Liberated Pixel Cup is a two-part competition: make a bunch of awesome
free culture licensed artwork, and program a bunch of free software
games that use it. Hopefully many cool projects can come out of
this… but that will only happen if people like you get involved!

Technically the project will run in three phases. One of the major
goals of the project is for the community to be able to produce
content that's stylistically consistent. To that end, "phase zero" of
the project is to produce a style guide that people can work off to
produce content that meshes together nicely, something along the lines
of what the Tango style guide does for icons. We've been working with
a few excellent artists to commission a base example set to build the
style guide out of, and we're fairly thrilled with where things are going!

And this is where you come in: "Phase one" of the competition will
then be building artwork that matches that guide that should then be
uploaded to OpenGameArt and dual licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 and
GPLv3. This part of the project will run from June 1st through June
30th. "Phase two" of this competition will be building GPLv3 or later
games that incorporate artwork from the artwork building phase of the
project. People can work in teams or individually, and this portion
of the contest will run from July 1st through July 31st.

Afterwards will be judging entries and handing out awards. We're
planning on giving out some prizes for both the content building and
the game programming phases. To see more details about all this,
check out the rules page.

We think Liberated Pixel Cup is a great opportunity for the commons in
many ways! Right now it's hard to find free culture content to
bootstrap games that match a consistent style and hard for artists to
collaborate on such. We're also very interested in areas where free
software and free culture directly intersect, which we don't always
see enough of (and which sometimes can even get a bit complex, so it's
good to have opportunities to think about them when we can), and games
are a great example of this overlap. We hope you'll participate!

And on that note, there's several things we'd like to fund with this
project. First of all, we'd like to pay the artists that have we've
commissioned for this style guide actual money, as laying down a set
of fundamentals for the artwork is a lot of serious work. Second,
we'd like to be able to do cool things like give out prizes for people
who win the various stages of the competition.

To that end, we're trying to raise some money for the Liberated Pixel
Cup. So please help make that happen, and donate today!